The Cassilis Engagement: Hankin’s “Comedy for Mothers”

Abstract

T H E C A S S I L I S E N G A G E M E N T : H A N K I N ’ S “ C O M E D Y F O R M O T H E R S ” HARRY LANE University of Guelph S t . John Hankin gave his 1907 volume of plays the defiant title Three Plays With Happy Endings, a description that has frequently been taken to be ironic or facetious, for none of the plays ends happily in the conventional sense. Eustace, the prodigal son of The Return of the Prodigal, finds no fatted calf awaiting his penniless return from Australia and the play ends with his departure, once he has astutely extorted a regular allowance from his unwilling family. The charity that Lady Denison dispenses so self-righteously in The Charity that Began at Home yields only envy and mutual irritation among its beneficiaries and, like The Cassilis Engagement, the play ends with a broken engagement. Nevertheless, Hankin is in earnest about the happiness of these endings and argues persuasively in a preface that all three are actually triumphs of reason and reasonableness over sentimentality and prejudice. All of Hankin’s plays are built on a basic conflict between commonsense and stupidity and therefore tend inevitably to debunk cher­ ished assumptions about success and nobility of character. Consequently, while the plays have been called “dry,” “cynical,” or even “sardonic,” his characters have been thought to lack emotional momentum. “Hankin’s peo­ ple always do everything ‘without passion’,” argues P. P. Howe, complaining of the playwright’s “inability, after he has given his people life, to give them ardour.” 1 It is the aim of this article to defend Hankin’s use of the word “happy,” particularly with reference to The Cassilis Engagement, and to show that he endows some of his characters with great passion and sensitiv­ ity, while others are deliberately denied these qualities. “The fools will go to the theatre in any circumstances,” Hankin wrote. “The problem is to attract the clever people.” 2 He sought to attract them with plays that, beneath a veneer of drawing-room comedy conventions and witty dialogue, were primarily investigations of ideas. Their intellectual focus is always ensured by the presence in each play of at least one witty, articulate and, above all, perceptive provocateur, whose function it is to turn the argu­ ments of everybody else on their heads. However, the plays rarely become mere debates and are firmly and carefully rooted in clashes of personality E n g l is h S t u d ies in C anada, v iii, 4, December 1982 and prejudice, especially between parents and their children. The intellectual problems are given emotional import, usually, by the way in which they relate to a major decision concerning someone’s future, which is taken before the play ends. Thus, in The Return of the Prodigal, Mr. Jackson finally chooses the option of giving in to his prodigal son’s demand for an allow­ ance, but does so merely to help his own bid to enter Parliament. The family passionately condemn their son as a blackmailer and extortioner, but Eustace himself counters with the more rational and equally passionate argument that their own misguided ambitions have defeated them: I’ve succeeded because you’re a snob and the governor’s a snob, and that put you both in my power. I might have been as poor and as unscrupulous as you please without getting a halfpenny out of either of you. Luckily, the governor’s political ambitions and your social ambitions gave me the pull over you, and I used it. (i, 2 1 1 ) The Chanty that Began at Home ends with Hugh Verreker’s decision not to marry Margery Denison because, despite her good nature, they are funda­ mentally incompatible. “You look on life as a moral discipline,” he claims. “ I look on it as a means to enjoyment” (n, 112). The rightness of his de­ cision is substantiated not only by a three-act exposition of the relative simple-mindedness of the Denisons’ view of life in general but also by his own fluent...